Jerry Meandering

Our current generation of students loves to dress up for "Flower
Power Day'' on campus; true to their suburban heritage, they capture
the "look'' to perfection. But revisionists have succeeded in
adumbrating the details of the 1960s for them, softening the focus just
as television cameras make our news correspondents appear ageless and
wrinkle free. So I found myself trying hard to describe to our 9th
graders what it felt like in the late 1960s: not the sanitized,
romantic Woodstock version with which they have grown up but the
maelstrom of anger and divisiveness and jealousies that eventually drew
everyone in.

Jerry Rubin was a wild man in 1968. By standing (albeit temporarily)
on his convictions, he effectively indicted almost everyone, even
carefully conservative protesters like me. But that's not why I
disapproved of him. What really got to me was the fact that underneath
it all, he looked like he was having a lot more fun than the rest of
us, and he had laid claim to the high moral ground to boot. Talk about
having your cake and eating it, too.

When Jerry Rubin "sold out'' in a later incarnation, my disapproval
cemented itself. But I retained one angry image of him, hairy-chested
and wrapped in a desecrated American flag--the incarnation of what I
now recognize as the pure spirit of adolescence.

On my way to the assembly where I tried to explain some of these
feelings to the "seniors'' in our school, I noticed a trio of 5th
graders standing by the flagpole, discharging their morning
responsibility of raising our three flags. An early-winter wind gusted
through the leafless maples. The children were having a hard time
keeping the flags under control. The American flag briefly escaped and
touched the grass by the flagpole, and I came over to lend a hand.
Then, as soon as the flags had been secured to the line and the
students drew them up the pole, I found myself repeating the litany of
flag etiquette--explaining how important it is that the American flag
not touch the ground.

"It has to do with respect,'' I told them, feeling sententious and
conscious of the irony that we should be having this discussion the day
after Jerry Rubin died. Respect for the American flag. The 5th graders
nodded politely.

The children were eager to be off to class, and I to my cameo
appearance at our Upper School assembly. Turning my back on the
flagpole, I began to reflect on the meaning of Rubin's life. I thought
about how one generation leads to another, about my own father's recent
death, and about the ways in which we are all just "passing
through.''

I thought about how important it is to remember, every single moment
we share with our students, that we are all teaching and we are all
learning, often in ways we only dimly appreciate. That is a thought
that will stick with me.

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